The World Wide Web (“web”) contains a vast amount of information. Locating a desired portion of the information, however, can be challenging. This problem is compounded because the amount of information on the web and the number of new users inexperienced at web searching are growing rapidly.
Existing search engines operating in a networked computer environment, such as the web or in an individual computer, can provide search results in response to entry of a user's search query. In many instances, the search results are ranked in accordance with the search engine's scoring or ranking system or method. For example, existing search engines score or rank documents of a search result for a particular query based on the contents of the documents, such as on the number of times a keyword or particular word or phrase appears in each document in the search results. Documents include, but are not limited to, for example, web pages of various formats, such as HTML, XML, XHTML; Portable Document Format (PDF) files; word processor and application program document files, electronic mail, audio/video/multimedia files, advertisements (of numerous formats and media types), etc.
Other search engines base scoring or ranking on more than the content of the document. For example, one known method, described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,285,999 issued to Page and an article entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine,” by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (each of which is incorporated herein by reference), assigns a degree of importance to a document, such as a web page, based on the link structure of the web page. Other conventional methods involve selling a higher score or rank in search results for a particular query to third parties that want to attract users or customers to their web sites.
Some documents may be of particular interest to users that reside in or are interested in certain geographical areas. For example, documents associated with an on-line newspaper may be of most relevance to the geographical area covered by the newspaper. Documents associated with local businesses or organizations are additional examples of documents that may be of particular interest to a geographical area. Thus, it can be desirable for a search engine to know whether a document has geographical significance and return documents that are in proximity to the user.
One known approach to returning business listings that are proximate to a searcher is provided by online “yellow pages” services, such as those offered by Yahoo! Inc. and Citysearch.com. When using these yellow pages services, a user specifies a location, typically by entering an address, city/state, or zip code. The user then submits a search query, and a list of business listings is provided in response. Each business listing may include listing information, such as the business name, address, telephone number, business category, etc. In addition, the online search provider determines a distance between the business listings and the user location. The returned business listings are presented to the user in their order of distance from the user location.
Another known technique for providing a primitive form of geographic-based searching is the service previously offered by the search engine Northern Light. When using this service, users specify a location by entering information (such as street address, city and state, zip code) into a “where” field. Users also specify a search query via a “what” field. Finally, users specify a distance radius via a “how far” drop-down menu. The user-specified distance is used to restrict, or filter, the set of results otherwise returned by the search query, so that only those results with a location within the specified radius from the user location is presented.
One problem with known techniques for providing geographically-based search results is that the most relevant search results, taking into account both location and non-location factors, are often not returned to the user. Another problem is that the best results, even when presented, are not ranked highest in the search results and, therefore, may be obscured by less relevant results. This occurs because existing techniques omit the most relevant search results if the location of the result is not within the user defined radius of search (e.g., in the Northern Light example above), or are included with and/or ranked lower than other less relevant search results that have locations closer to the user (e.g., in the yellow pages example above). Other shortcomings in existing techniques include the need for users to explicitly define a radius of interest, and the need to manually enlarge the radius to find more relevant results that were not returned, or page through many pages of less relevant but geographically proximate results to find the most relevant result.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art to be able to provide the most relevant documents considering both geographic and non-geographic relevance and to, therefore, provide users with quick access to better search results.